ON LANGUAGE; Cleavage Umbrage

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published: August 12, 2007

Cleavage, a word once associated with a deep rift in Republican ranks, has now appeared within the Democratic Party.

''Good riddance to the Democratic Leadership Council'' was the incendiary subhead of an article on the Op-Ed page of The Times two weeks ago. The author, Noam Scheiber, is senior editor of The New Republic, once a media bastion of the centrist (never label us liberal) ''new Democrats'' whom Bill Clinton led to victory in the early '90s. But that was in the heyday of the Middle Way; now the era of triangulation is over. ''Today, the council has almost no constituency within the Democratic Party,'' the writer argued. ''On a variety of issues the council, and not the party's liberal base, is out of touch with the popular mood. . . . Democrats should thank the group and then tell it that it's no longer needed.''

If that expulsion came to pass, it would be political cleavage on a grand scale, not seen since the Republican Party suffered through its schism in 1964, when the ''mainstream moderates'' were driven into the wilderness by the Goldwater ''true believers.'' (Even today, an out-of-power G.O.P. wonders where its centrists went.)

Cleavage is a strong but multifaceted old noun that has gained an additional meaning. The Teutonic verb cleave means ''to split asunder''; the split hoof of many animals is said to be cloven. The O.E.D. found cleavage to have made its appearance in 1816 about the mechanical division of crystals ''sometimes called cleavage by lapidaries'' (cutters of gems, nothing to do with lap-dancing). It also became a metaphor in church controversies: ''When differences of religious opinion arose, they split society to its foundation,'' noted an 1867 essay on Martin Luther. ''The lines of cleavage penetrated everywhere.''

We now turn to its sexual sense. (About time, grumbles the reader, unaware of the first law of column-writing: Never put the story in the lede.) In the zoologist Ernst Haeckel's 1875 ''History of Creation,'' the propagation of the egg cell by repeated self-division was described as ''the so-called 'cleavage of the egg,' '' which we now know forms blastomeres and changes the single-celled zygote into a multicellular embryo, and which brings us to the recent explosion in the word's usage.

On the same Times Op-Ed page as the party-splitting article titled ''The Centrists Didn't Hold'' -- a poetic allusion slouching toward Yeats's ''things fall apart; the center cannot hold'' -- was this alliterative headline over a column by Judith Warner: ''The Cleavage Conundrum.'' (A 1645 word popularized by Alan Greenspan, conundrum is ''a puzzlement than can be dealt with only by a speculation.'')

''There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN-2,'' wrote Robin Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion writer for The Washington Post. ''It belongs to Senator Hillary Clinton. . . . There wasn't an unseemly amount of cleavage showing,'' the reporter granted, but she found it ''a provocation'' and ''startling to see that small acknowledgment of sexuality and femininity.''

The word was then in political play. ''In the grand American tradition,'' noted Editor & Publisher, ''it has also inspired a fund-raising pitch.'' Ann Lewis, a veteran political pro on the Clinton staff, seized the opportunity to denounce the ''coarseness and pettiness'' of the Post article, called it ''insulting'' to notice the neckline and solicited a contribution. The Boston Globe labeled the cultural brouhaha ''Body Politics.'' On ''Meet the Press,'' Andrea Mitchell of NBC, paraphrasing Freud's reported comment about the symbolism of a cigar, said, ''Sometimes a blouse is just a blouse.''

The last time the word got this much publicity was more than a half-century ago, in television's infancy, when the actress and interviewer Faye Emerson unabashedly -- and to many viewers, shockingly -- broke the buttoned-up dress code of decorum then prevalent. I profiled Faye and her husband, Skitch Henderson, back then for Esquire; she knew that her low neckline led to high ratings.

I did not realize it at the time, but the lapidarian-religious-medical meanings of cleavage had only recently been joined by a new sense of ''the cleft between a woman's breasts as revealed by a low-cut d?lletage.'' That O.E.D. definition has as its earliest citation a Time magazine article of Aug. 5, 1946: ''Low-cut Restoration costumes . . . display too much 'cleavage' (Johnson Office trade term for the shadowed depression dividing an actress's bosom into two distinct sections).'' Unless a search engine belches out an earlier usage, that's a coinage stunner: it was Hollywood that invented the latest sense of cleavage.

Age Cannot Wither

While transfixed by this subject, consider the staying power of words other than cleavage ending in -age, pronounced idge in English and ahzh in French.

Although baked-potato skins and antidigestible breakfast cereals are no longer called roughage (a word replaced by the fashionable fiber), we still have dotage, from the verb dote -- ''to lavish attention on, as to a grandchild'' -- now rescued from harshness toward senility by a pun, anecdotage.

Umbrage, rooted in the Latin umbra, ''shadow,'' is a milder word than its synonyms, ''resentment, offense,'' and a long step back from ''outrage.''

Then there's d?lletage, a French word adopted whole into English, with the French ahzh ending. The Latin collum is ''neck''; from that came the French collet, ''collar.'' Because the prefix de means ''out of,'' the meaning is ''without much of a collar covering the neck,'' which means ''exposing the bosom's cleft.'' In 1831, Lord Greville in his memoir of life at the Court of St. James's, wrote, ''The Queen is a prude, and will not let the ladies come d?llet? to her parties.''